WARNING: This page is a sample of news library INTRANET. Some links do not work and information may not be current.

N&O Newsroom
Bold Idea Award

The bold idea award, named the Alexandre Dumas award in honor of the swashbuckling creator of such adventures creator of such adventures as "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers," is a large brass urn that will rotate from winner to winner. Anders, Melanie, Will and Mike will make the selection each month.

Month Winner
August 1998 James Shiffer and Chuck Liddy
July 1998 Chris Hardesty
May 1998 Peder Zane
April 1998 Kate Anthony, Damon Cain, & Robin Johnston
March 1998 Chuck Small
February 1998 Jemele Hill and Corey Lowenstein
December 1997 Dan Gearino
November 1997 Joe Dew
October 1997 Karen Hughes
September 1997 Martha Quillin
August 1997 Maile Carpenter
July 1997 Michele Kurtz
June 1997 Corey Lowenstein


August 1998 - James Shiffer and Chuck Liddy

Here's what Trish Wilson had to say about Shiffer and Liddy:

THE BOLD IDEA award goes to James Shiffer and Chuck Liddy for their fabulous work doing The River Chronicles.

The idea to do this actually started percolating last spring. No one agrees anymore on how this idea got launched, but the way I remember it, James and I started talking about it awhile ago, but then we decided no one would ever let us do this. Then I go to this meeting in May, and the room is filled with a bunch of pretty bored editors thinking about the long summer ahead. So Pat, who by this time has been an editor for about a day, says let's do an adventure series. Then he launches into this long story about how when he worked in Charlotte, he was sent into the forest to do an adventure series for a whole week, with no food, and no tent. All he had was 10 matches, a knife, a canteen of water, a snake bite kit, and a book called "Living off the Country." He lost 18 pounds.

The logo was, and I kid you not, it was 1969, the logo was Babe in the Woods.

So everyone in the meeting gets very excited and they bat around several possibilities. And i come back upstairs and I tell Shiffer, you know that crazy idea of yours to canoe the Neuse? Well, maybe you can. So that's how the series got started.

Then we had to find a photographer. I called Gene. Gene says it's got to be Chuck Liddy. I'm thinking the odd couple, could work.

This is what Gene said: "Chuck goes home every day from work and works out. He's got this boxing thing, this treadmill, he does all these exercises. That's how he takes his tension out."

"And he calls me. About everyday. He calls me while he's doing his exercises and tells me how good it feels."

"I knew I needed to assign it to someone who could sit in the back of the canoe and help the reporter. And Chuck was the only one in good enough shape to do it, on my staff."

Gene pauses a minute and then he says: "I needed someone who could carry more than his weight."

So then Chuck and James really get going. James does about three weeks worth of research, and Chuck takes care of getting the canoe, the gear, all the water-proofing stuff etc. It was quite a logistical feat. But it was also a very BOLD undertaking.

Because even when you look at Chuck or James, even though you're probably thinking, these guys are two total outdoorsmen, macho even, the real truth is that for days before they left all they would talk about is the snakes. Copperheads. They told me that they were told that the copperheads would jump from tree limbs into the canoe while they were paddling by. I'm like, give me a break. They're dead serious. So James buys himself a machete. Then when Chuck finds out about James' machete, he needs to have a machete also. So now there are two machetes in the canoe. And of course, the first snake they ever see is in a cage.

The point, however, is that it was not just a bold idea. It was a story very boldly undertaken, and boldly told. Readers loved it, the river guys were in the papers, and on TV, and on the radio. People waited for them on the river, Kinston parks and recreation dept. hung a banner over the river telling them to stop and then they had a pig pickin for them. In New Bern, the Neuse River Foundation folks greeted them with a regatta of 20 boats, and they almost capsized in the wakes. And that was about the time that Chuck hit Shiffer in the head with his paddle, which didn't go over very well.

And I'm sitting at my desk editing the latest installment and reading all this and thinking, thank God the machetes weren't around.

So, to Chuck and James, congratulations. To some people, you're the river guys. To me, you're two babes in a canoe.


July 1998 - Chris Hardesty

Sperry Krueger presented the Bold Idea Award to Chris:

This month's Dumas award for bold ideas is presented to Chris Hardesty. Chris demonstrated his aptitude for bold ideas in researching and telling the story of Lucille Rebecca Alexander, whose remains were found in a small Durham house approximately 10 years after her death.

Research is much more than databases, computers and online searching. Research is knowing all the places to look for the information you need and knowing more than one route for finding that information. What's more, research is an attitude!

Chris's natural curiousity and persistance, combined with his research and gumshoe skills, helped shed light on Alexander's life. With what seemed to be almost no information to go on, Chris discovered incredible details about this woman. Sifting through the waist high debris of Alexander's home with Amanda Garrett, Chris found leads to pursue. He used everything from simple print resources like city directories to the full range of our online people tracking tools.

We're pleased to present the Bold Idea Award to Chris and to make the cup special, we've included a two hour supply of diet coke, a four hour supply of cigarettes, a home-made gift certificate to burger hut, and a skull to remind him of a great story -- "bones."


June 1998 --no award presented


May 1998 -- Peter Zane

And here's what Felicia Gressette said in presenting the award to Peder:

Among the many accomplishments of Peder Zane are:

But none of those accomplishments have earned him this month's Bold Ideas award. He wins that for two other reasons:

First, for seizing upon the idea of short fiction as unique and valuable and then shepherding it into reality in the form of our new Sunday Reader feature.

And second, for coming up with the idea of having weekly book sales that not only clear the department of a mountain of books but also raise a few bucks for local causes. And satisfy the ethics policy, to boot.


April 1998 -- Kate Anthony, Damon Cain, & Robin Johnston

The Bold Idea Award went to Kate Anthony, Damon Cain and Robin Johnston for their work with the design update. Here's what Will Sutton said in his presentation:

There's a popular line frequently quoted, and it goes like this: If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

That is the conventional wisdom but there's lots of unconventional wisdom at the N&O so sometimes we do unconventional things. Our newspaper ain't broken but we set out to fix it.

Backed by one helluva team of folks, Kate Anthony, Damon Cain and Robin Johnston set out to do the impossible.

Changing an already good-looking newspaper into an even better looking newspaper under tremendous pressure of an April 19th deadline, this threesome led a host of others through the process of updating our masthead, our section flags, our page folios, our stock pages and, of course, the now-famous column photo sigs.

Perhaps you don't understand the volume of work involved. Let me help you.

With daily and nightly section deadlines that did not disappear, this team worked:

Design gets no bylines or credit lines most of the time. We know their good work when we see it but few newsroom staffers know who did what page when and why. We'll work on that in coming months.

The newspaper's design speaks volumes to readers. Before they look at a photo, read a headline or dive into a story, a page design grabs a reader or it doesn't.

Our updated design is sure to grab more readers more often.

Join me in congratulating Kate, Damon and Robin as they represent a host of others who made Phase One of our design update a success.


March 1998 -- Chuck Small

Bringing together more than 40 N&O journalists with hundreds of high schools students from across the state is certainly a bold idea. Some would even say it's crazy when you consider the many months of hard work involved -- from lining up speakers to meeting with teachers to making sure the school activity buses didn't get towed. But that is just the idea -- and the mammoth undertaking -- that Chuck did during the month of March.

In his tenure at The News & Observer, Chuck has consistently worked to improve the paper's relationship with young readers. He helped start Nando.next for high school journalists, several of whom are now pursuing college journalism degrees and one of whom is working part-time on the copy and design desks. Chuck also helps with Newspapers In Education, the Horizons page and the weekly Schools page. But the culmination of his work with teenagers was the Journalism Day conference held at UNC on March 8.

Chuck did much of the legwork to bring the conference together, often giving much of his free time. It's not unusual for Chuck to work late on Friday night editing weekend copy, then turn around and attend an early Saturday meeting of young journalists. (And believe me, for a copy editor to get up early on a Saturday morning takes true dedication.

These days, there's a lot of handwringing among newspapers about reaching the younger audience, trying to get them hooked on newspapers and laying the groundwork for a new generation of readers. Chuck is not just talking about it. He's going out, spending a lot of his own time, for the betterment of the entire newsroom.


February 1998 -- Jemele Hill and Corey Lowenstein

Jemele Hill and Corey Lowenstein shared the Bold Idea Award for February. Lowenstein is the newsroom's first two-time winner. In presenting the award to the duo, Will Sutton said, " Every journalist who has been listening the last decade or so knows that the strength of a newspaper is frequently determined by its visual appeal and the power of its writing. When you combine the two you get dynamite and that happened for us recently when Jemele Hill and Corey Lowenstein teamed up for a great team effort." Sports editor Steve Riley explained their idea to provide a behind-the-scenes look at the winner of the women's ACC Tournament. "The last team standing was UNC, and the result was a wonderful reader, beautifully illustrated, that ran in Sports the Tuesday after the tournament ended on Sunday," Riley wrote. "It was the kind of look at women's sports that we've rarely gotten, and it was a surprise to the reader....We like doing that."


January 1998 -- no award presented


December 1997 -- Dan Gearino

Dan Gearino got the Andre Dumas "Bold Idea" Award And here's what Felicia said in presenting Dan with the Dumas loving cup and a jar of pickled eggs: "We have a lot of beats at this newspaper; they're how we have organized ourselves to cover things. We have courts beats, cops beats, county government beats, lots of beats. "You might not think of it this way, but Dan Gearino has a beat, too. He calls it "people trying desperately -- in their own odd little way -- not to be ordinary." He covers these folks with compassion, with humor, with style, with the very distinctive voice of a writer at the top of his game. Sure, he's a skilled columnist, too. There's no mistaking the Dan Gearino view of the world, as expressed in his columns. But in the months since he also started writing longer stories for the Features department, Dan has shown us all that writing with voice doesn't depend on a label -- that of column -- but on being assured enough of your own sense of things, your own powers of observation, your own gift for language -- to dare it.


November 1997 -- Joe Dew

Joe Dew received the Bold Idea Award. Ned Barnett said of Dew, "All good reporters take chances, but even the bravest get skittish about putting their private lives on public display. Joe Dew was one of them. When editors asked to publish the e-mail messages he sent to staffers about the premature birth of his son, Bryce, Joe said he would have to talk to his wife, Myra, and think about going on stage with his hopes, fears and prayers. After a while, he said yes. The result was the E-mail Tale, a Thanksgiving story unlike anything The N&O has published. When his messages were stitched together on a page they revealed a new kind of story, one written a message at a time with no idea of what the next will say. And they revealed a new side of the newspaper, a side in which we are like those we so often write about: people facing a sudden challenge and calling on all they have and others can give to make their way through. In letting his story go, Joe took a bold chance. It worked. It will be long remembered by readers and someday be read anew by the boy at the center of the story.


October 1997 -- Karen Hughes

Teresa Leonard presented the award to Karen. Here's what she said:

Karen Hughes had the bold idea to get a head start on a project and the even bolder idea to get departments throughout the company to work together on it.

The result is the Ski Package that will begin publication December 7.

The project began as the annual special travel section on skiing, complete with a graphic pointing out the location of ski resorts in our area. But as usual, Karen saw that it could be much more. She met with Joe Miller and David Alff to discuss the possibilities. Of course, the graphic could be turned into a poster for IQ to market. Grey Blackwell and Margaret Baxter took care of that.

But why stop there? Karen enlisted the help of Renee Bollten in News Research to contact each of the resorts from Maryland to Alabama and pull together everything you could ever want to know about skiing there: location, 800 number, website, hours and rates, types of slopes, lessons, equipment rentals, whether they have ice skating or snowboarding or dirt skiing, what kinds of restaurants and bars you'll find there, everything.

And as long as we've got that information, why not make it searchable? The next thing we knew, she had pulled in Richard Gay, the newest member of the new media staff to put the whole thing up on the web.

Karen always has her eyes open toward advertising and promoting IQ products, so she has already arranged for house ads to run the past two weeks promoting the section and including a coupon to pre-order the poster! These were scheduled to coincide nicely with the ski expo held in RTP last weekend. She also saw to it that rack cards will appear beginning November 26 and running through December 8. She worked with Display Advertising early on so that they were able to sell space for the travel section as a package deal with the poster. And later in the year, once ski season is in full force, you will see the poster as an incentive offered to new subscribers by our Circulation department. It will also be on display in customer services for folks to purchase on the spot.

In an environment where so often all of our attention and energies are on the next step in front of us and on our one little piece of the puzzle, the results of really looking around and considering the possibilities (and a willingness to be kicked out of the graphics department once in a while) are the key to Karen's success.


September 1997 -- Martha Quillin

The Alexander Dumas Bold Idea award went to Martha Quillin. Melanie Sill presented the award to Martha and said, "In describing this month's Bold Idea winner, I'm reminded of an old capsule review of the movie "Gone With The Wind." It described the plot of the four-hour epic this way: "Spoiled Southern belle works to regain wealth and status in the hard years after the Civil War." You might do equal damage trying to sum up Martha Quillin's two-part Pecan Tree Chronicles. This story was, in one sense, about Hurricane Fran's effects on one place. But there was so much more to this chronicle. Just as life itself is complex and many-layered, Martha's story showed that no event may be understood in isolation. Martha's assignment was vague: Look for a story that shows how Hurricane Fran affected people in the bigger sense, beyond insurance claims and home repairs. It was her idea that turned into the Pecan Tree Chronicles, a much more profound story about human beings and change, both sudden and slow. "


August 1997 -- Maile Carpenter

Our Alexander Dumas recipient this month is Maile Carpenter, who has thrown herself into a beat where the pen is powerful but a sword could occasionally come in handy as well. Her August 24 A&E cover on "The Big Story" at WTVD was a high point of her coverage of the Triangle airwaves. Good reporting always takes fearlessness and perseverange, and this piece was no exception. Maile persued the story to answer a question: Why were so many on-air newspeople leaving the station? The pivotal person in the story, the news director, would not return her phone calls, and no one (except for a source with credibility problems) wanted to talk on the record. But Maile persisted and not only got the story but also told readers a lot about the broadcast industry in general and this market in particular. The Dumas cup that comes with this award will be filled, in this case, with a choice bottle of wine.


July 1997 -- Michele Kurtz

Charles Jeffries presented the award:

Michele Kurtz gets the bold idea award, but with a twist: for BOLDLY going where no one -- expecially the Durham school board -- wanted her to go -- their retreat in the mountains near Grassy Creek.

They tried everything to keep her out. They booked all the rooms in a bed and breakfast; the entire facility had a single phone and they unsuccesfully pleaded for her to give them some privacy so they could work out their much publicized differences. But Michele persisted.

When asked not to report, she cried Back off!
When requested to leave them alone, Oh no!, she said.
When asked to give them some space, Like Hell I will, she cried.
The superintendent even offered her a job, Don't bet on it, she said.


June 1997 -- Corey Lowenstein

Corey Lowenstein is the first bold idea wi her courage and verve in spending four nights in a shelter for the homeless. Gene Furr selected the winner this time. This isn't the only instance in which Corey has gone to the edge for an assignment, just the most recent one.